Tracie Morris
Tracie Morris is an American poet, performer, vocalist and academic originally from Brooklyn, New York.
Career
Morris emerged as a poet, performer and writer from the Lower East Side poetry scene in the early 1990s. She became known as a local poet in the "slam" scene located in the Nuyorican Poets Cafe in New York City, New York, and eventually made the 1993 Nuyorican Poetry Slam team, the same year she won the Nuyorican Grand Slam. [[citation]]] She competed in the 1993 National Poetry Slam held that year in San Francisco along with her Nuyorican teammates Maggie Estep, Hal Sirowitz and Regie Cabico.[1]
Soon after, she began touring with other "slam poets" around the country and abroad, including Maggie Estep, Dael Orlandersmith, Mike Tyler and Paul Beatty and performed her work on MTV's Spoken Word: Unplugged.[2] She was also performing with music from the outset of her poetry career—collaborating with musicians she met through the Black Rock Coalition. Morris' work is embraced by slam and performance poets as well as the Language Poets, a contemporary poetic avant-garde. She is featured, for example, on Charles Bernstein's Close Listening radio program[3] and was featured at a 2008 conference on Conceptual Poetics alongside Bernstein, Marjorie Perloff, Craig Dworkin and others.
Morris is now known as a sound artist and specialist in sound poetry[4] and as an occasional theatrical performer. (She is also a singer with composer/musician Elliott Sharp's band, Terraplane, and her eponymous band.) She has studied British acting technique at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, London as well as Laban and Meisner techniques in the United States.[5] Her work was featured in the 2002 Whitney Biennial.[6] In 2008 her poem "Africa(n)" was included on the compilation album Crosstalk: American Speech Music (Bridge Records; produced by Mendi & Keith Obadike). Morris has a Ph.D. in Performance Studies from NYU and an MFA in poetry from Hunter College, CUNY; and has taught in several institutions of higher education (she is a full professor at Pratt Institute, specializing in Performance Studies). She was the 2007-2008 Center for Programs in Contemporary Writing Fellow at the University of Pennsylvania.[7]
Featured recordings
With Elliott Sharp
- Terraplane: Forgery
- Terraplane: Secret Life
- Radio-Hyper-Yahoo
- Terraplane: Sky Road Songs
- 4AM Always
With Uri Caine
- The Goldberg Variations (Winter & Winter, 2000)
Books
"Rhyme Scheme", 2012, Zasterle Press
Intermission, 1998, Soft Skull Press
Chap-T-Her Won, 1993, TM Ink
Notes
- ↑ Aptowicz, Cristin O'Keefe. (2008). Words in Your Face: A Guided Tour Through Twenty Years of the New York City Poetry Slam. New York City: Soft Skull Press. "Chapter 14: First and Always; Graduates from the NYC Poetry Slam's First Wave" ISBN 1-933368-82-9.
- ↑ MTV's Unplugged series Episode Guide
- ↑ PennSound.
- ↑ Sound poetry
- ↑ Tracie Morris website.
- ↑ 2002 Whitney Biennial List of Artists
- ↑ Fellow in Poetics & Poetic Practice
References
- The Columbia Granger's Index to Poetry in Anthologies by Tessa Kale
- Right to Rock: The Black Rock Coalition and the Cultural Politics of Race by Maureen Mahon
- The Stamp of Class: Reflections on Poetry and Social Class by Gary Lenhart
- Uptown Conversation: The New Jazz Studies by Robert O'Meally, Brent Hayes Edwards, and Farah Jasmine Griffin
- Living in Spanglish: The Search for Latino Identity in America by Ed Morales, St. Martin's Press: 2003
- Production Notebooks Volume 2 by Mark Bly
- Geography: Art/race/exile by Ralph Lemon and Ann Daly
- Listen Up! by Zoe Angelsey
- Girls Guide to Taking Over the World: Writings From The Girl Zine Revolution by Tristan Taormino, Karen Green, and Ann Magnuson
- Poetry Slam: The Competitive Art of Performance Poetry by Gary Mex Glazner
- We Who Love to Be Astonished: Experimental Women’s Writing and Performance Poetics. edited by Laura Hinton and Cynthia Hogue.
- The Muse is Music: Jazz Poetry from the Harlem Renaissance to Spoken Word by Meta DuEwa Jones University of Illinois Press, 2011
External links
- The Land and the People - The Poets.
- Personal website
- PennSound page, many recordings and videos.
- Poetry Foundation.
- Poetry MP3 Picks - Poems for online listening
- Jon Pareles, "Music Review: A Steamy Mix of Poetry, Afrocentric Themes and Love" (on Tracie Morris's Sonic Synthesis), New York Times, December 18, 1999.
- [1]
- [2]
